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In Part 1 Akkana Peck talked about Unicode, character sets and encoding -- how accented and special characters are transferred in email and web pages, and why you see funny characters. But can you fix it when it goes wrong? And if you're a programmer, how should you be handling all these encodings?

"On 1st October, Unicode 5.2 was released! The data files, code charts, and Unicode Standard Annexes for this version are final and are posted on the Unicode site. For Unicode 5.2, the core specification is no longer just a delta document applied to the book; instead, the entire core specification,with all textual changes integrated, will be available on the Unicode site.

GNU Recode supports over 150 character sets, and converts just about anything to anything. For example, there are still users of legacy Linux systems that still run ISO-8859-1. Recode will convert these to nice modern UTF-8

"I can’t believe this can be so difficult! I’ve for a long time used Emacs and VM for one of a couple of email accounts. It’s great, fast and wonderful. However, Emacs VM doesn’t deal with IMAP that well and I decided last month to ditch it for Mutt [...] So now, I get full UTF-8 support as well as Emacs shortcuts when running Mutt/Emacs inside an SSH session! "